"Hey, Wait a Second -- This Bill Sucks"

Someone once referred to it as the Bugs Bunny “What am I doing?!?” moment.  It’s that classic scene when everyone’s favorite wiseacre realizes what he's doing just stopped making sense – politely agreeing that Marvin the Martian should blow up Earth, for example – and literally stops himself in his tracks.  Congressional Democrats seem to be having this moment right now.  The House has produced a bill that largely tracks to achieving the health care reform platform the presidential candidates ran on;  the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee does so in a somewhat weaker way.  The Senate Finance Committee and Sen. Max Baucus, on the other hand, was poised to deliver a negotiated, watered-down bill, with quite a number of unproven and cockamamie gimmicks specifically designed to appeal to Chuck Grassley and in an attempt to be bipartisan.

It’s time to look at the end products and say, “If what bipartisanship nets us is a sucky bill… it’s probably no longer worth it.”

First into the fray was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, with a wake-up call that got people talking.  As first reported in Roll Call, “Reid told Baucus that taxing health benefits and failing to include a strong government-run insurance option of some sort in his bill would cost 10 to 15 Democratic votes; Reid told Baucus it wasn’t worth securing the support of Grassley and at best a few additional Republicans.” Jon Cohn on The Treatment quickly established what might be called the progressive blogger consensus:  “Bipartisanship is good but a sound health reform bill is better. If winning over just one or even a handful of Republicans means gutting the bill, it's not worth it.”  This same “trade 2 Republican votes for 15 Democratic ones” cost benefit analysis is doubtlessly what prompted Chuck Schumer to prophesy that the public health insurance option – which is as popular as taxing health benefits is unpopular with the general public – would be included in the bill one way or the other.

Reid’s was the loudest voice, but far from the only one. Sen. Bernie Sanders who has been supporting the public plan as a backup to his own single-payer bill, declared, “I think that it is fair to say that there are a number of us who would not be voting for anything resembling a Baucus-type plan as we understand it right now.”  Rep. Raúl Grijalva, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, sounded the alarm over a perceived openness on the part of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel to the trigger option, whereby a public plan would be kicked down a road for a few years and only come into play if private insurance hadn’t proven capable of bringing down the costs of health care by themselves:  “I want to be crystal clear that any such trigger for a strong public plan option is a non-starter with a majority of the Members of the Progressive Caucus.”  Translation:  good luck getting such a thing passed through the House.  Granted, the progressive caucus has been sending out releases regularly against the trigger, the health co-op, and anything that waters down the subsidies to make health insurance affordable to low- and middle-class families. Rep. Henry Waxman, one of the chairs of the “Tri-Committee” which is wrote the draft health care bill in the house and is guiding it in for a landing, hasn’t ventured into the fray on these debates in the Senate… until today, when an interview with him was entitled, “House Dems Won’t Budge on Public Option.”

Here’s the political reality – it was always a good idea to try for bipartisanship on a bill that would so dramatically change the lives of Americans across the country, both those with and without insurance.  But, and this is an important but, only if the process somehow led to a better bill or, at least, an air of legitimacy.  From the “Washington takeover” rhetoric in the House, to John McCain’s snotty but factually correct tweet, “peeling off an R or 2 is not real negotiation”, to Tom Coburn’s war on jungle gyms, that whiff of bipartisan legitimacy just ain’t coming.

Everyone keeps looking to the bipartisanship of the Senate Finance Bill as a test of its success.  This is fundamentally misguided, dangerous and flat-out wrong.  The ONLY test of its success is whether it gives every American a chance at quality, affordable health care. If we’re rushing an ineffective and half-baked co-op proposal, or leaving families making between $60,000 and $80,000 a year with no affordable health care options, or creating an unpopular and easy to demonize new tax on health benefits just to peel of “an R or 2”, that’s the equivalent of Marvin the Martian holding the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator in his hands.

(Photo credit:  Hey Paul on Flickr.)